Matt Goss’ career was so promising as he ended 2011, with a silver medal in the Worlds Road Race, the 20111 Milan-Sanremo and wins Down Under and in Paris-Nice. Many would have laughed back then if someone had said he would only record two wins in three seasons following 2011, albeit at big races like Tirreno-Adriatico and the Giro. Yet that is what happened. The Australian has passed through the Orica-Greenedge ranks and is now at MTN-Qhubeka, where he is looking to kickstart his career, as he told Rouleur.cc.

He says things started to go wrong when he was with Greenedge, who he signed for in 2012 after HTC-Highroad folded. He said he did too many races and trained too often, leaving him tired.

“I always tried to do more and the team always put me in more races. And I always tried to train more – I thought more was better. I guess that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned: I don’t need to do 85 race days by the end of the Tour de France, I don’t need to be training so much harder than what I was in 2011. I was already winning good bike races then… I need to go back and do what I was originally doing.”

He also thinks he targeted the wrong events, focusing too much on bunch kicks rather than on reduced finishes on long, hilly days. He says he can return to this role at MTN-Qhubeka.

“With GreenEdge, I probably did too many of the sprints whereas in the past, I’d never done that: [at HTC-Columbia] I’d worked with Cavendish and Greipel for the main sprints and took my opportunity on certain days,” Goss says. “With MTN-Qhubeka, there’s obviously a lot of sprinters to share that role with, so I can go back to doing a similar role that I had in those years when I was winning a lot of big bike races.”

He says MTN have a lot of sprinters. That is almost an understatement. Goss, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Theo Bos and Tyler Farrar were all signed this offseason to a team that already had sprinters in Gerald Ciolek, Youcef Reguigui and Kristian Sbaragli. The question many are asking is how will all these fast men with egos work together to win races? Goss has an answer:

“The key is going to be mutual respect and honesty. If everyone communicates well and says when they’re having good days and bad days. If we have that, which is what we’ll find out now, there’s no reason we can’t be winning some really big and good bike races quite often.”

Goss didn’t have the best of days at Milan-Sanremo this year, finishing 79th, but says that he is getting ready for his first cobbled campaign in three years, a big plus for him.

“I haven’t been able to do Roubaix for the last three years because GreenEdge always wanted me to go to the Giro,” Goss says. “So it’s gonna be nice to go back and have another crack at it. I really love that race.”

Goss is only 28 and has plenty of time to refind the form he had as a fast finishing 24 year old in Sanremo, and he says the main thing to rediscovering it is confidence.

“Confidence is a big thing,” he reflects. “It has a knock-on effect. Once you get the confidence, you seem to just float along, you believe a lot more than when you haven’t won. You know you can: it’s not hoping and believing and thinking. It only takes one win sometimes to get that confidence, that instinct, back, I guess.”